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Can My Survival be Subrogated?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Christopher Cherry
Christopher Cherry
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury
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Extract

John S. Dunne says that in its most general form the ‘problem of death’ is this: ‘If I must some day die, what can I do to satisfy my desire to live?’ His aim is to ‘discover what[men] have done or tried to do to make themselves immortal’ —or at any rate to prolong their lives indefinitely, a rather different matter. His book charts the adoption and subsequent rejection of a succession of historical ‘solutions’ to this problem: ‘surrogates’of one or another kind for everlasting life, as he calls them. The surrogates he examines are many and varied: the shared experience of life and death; the appropriation of the dead by the living; immortal fame; immortal status; autonomous life and autonomous death; and others still.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 59 , Issue 230 , October 1984 , pp. 443 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984

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References

1 P. xi, and elsewhere, in The City of the Gods (London: Sheldon Press, 1974).Google Scholar

2 Op. cit. xiv.

3 Op. cit. xii, and elsewhere. He uses other expressions too: for instance, ‘vicarious life’ (p. 21).

4 Admirable though his book is, Dunne pays inadequate attention to the differences in logic between individual (personal) and collective survival claims, so ducking the terms of his own question. Thus:‘... the person might be said to survive if one understands the person to be a spirit that can exist in a less particularized manner than it does when it is incarnated in a human individuality’ (p. 20). And again: ‘Objective immortality is a notion that is meant to mediate between the idea of personal immortality and that of impersonal immortality’(p. 21). One reason why he is so careless with the distinction is that, like many others, he takes ‘survival’ to mean both ‘continued existence of one and the same person’ and ‘a given mode of persisting (whether personal or other)’. And of course the mode in which an entity is presumed to persist bears crucially upon the matter of whether or not that entity shall be deemed a person, and if he is, whether or not he is to be identified with some given individual now deceased.

5 It is necessary to introduce a clause of this kind not so muchbecause people are characteristically mistaken about how much longer they have to live but because, unless they are in certain ways self-referential, the objects of people's wants, hopes and ambitions are public and can afterthey have died be espoused, pursued and achieved by others still living. The poet John Clare wished to have inscribed on his tombstone ‘Here rest the Hopes and Ashes of John Clare’. Clare's hoping did indeed die with him, but what he hoped for did not.

6 ‘[I]n preparing for my death in the [testamentary] ways I havementioned, I am precisely not conceiving of it. In imagination, I am livingat a time beyond my death—a time at which I am not merely a spectator but an active dispenser of favors and disfavors to my survivors … I am, in my mind's eye, pushing back the leading edge of the gap in my consciousness.I am thinking of myself not as dead at all but as alive’ Johnstone, Henry W., Jr, ‘Sleep and Death’, The Monist 59).Google Scholar

7 He might have done better to choose to exit intact; that will depend on the outcome of the operation. But this is another question.

8 ‘With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet… I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs’ (Ch. V, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley). It will be said that there are great differences between being dead and being irreversibly comatose. Of course, but they are not differences which mean anything to the subject; and that is the point.Google Scholar

9 A. Toynbee, p. 69, ‘Traditional Attitudes towards Death’, collected in Men's Concern with Death, by A. Toynbee and others (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969).Google Scholar

10 I do not here discuss how far she sees them as three distinct ‘solutions’, and what Plato himself thinks of their respective merits.

11 P. 87 (Penguin Classics, 1956), W., Hamilton's translation.Google Scholar

12 Op. cit. 87.

13 Ibid.

14 Op. cit. 89.

15 Op. cit. 90.

16 Homer's heroes have at least one eye fixed upon posterity, and he is ever attentive on their behalf to the ‘glorious deeds of men’ (klea andron); Beowulf is ‘the most eager for praise’ (lof-geornost) in his desire for ‘a name that shall never die beneath the heavens’; Tass declares that ‘the name of Leonid Brezhnev … will live for ever in the hearts of the Soviet people and all progressive mankind’.

17 Op. cit. 91. Plato deploys a similar argument in the Phaedrus.

18 ‘Egoism, Love and Political Office in Plato’, Philosophical Review 82 (1973), 330–344. In view of what follows, it must be pointed out in fairness to Kraut that his discussion of survival-surrogates is brief and incidental to his central concerns. He is one of very few philosophers to interest himself, if only en passant, in this topic.

19 Op. cit. 341.

20 Kraut thinks otherwise partly because his account of surrogate-desires is perfunctory, and partly because he finds no special problem where the desire in question is one to survive: ‘If x cannot be done and y is sufficiently like x, then y may be regarded as a substitute for x, a second best. For example, if I want to paint something red and red is unavailable, I may decide to paint it orange instead … The relationship between being virtuous for ever and creating virtue should be interpreted in the same way … Our desire to be virtuous for ever, however, since it cannot besatisfied, gives rise to a desire for some second best, some goal which we regard as similar to the original goal. … I can create virtue in someone who will survive me and who will in t u rn create virtue in someone who survives him. If each member of this chain inculcates virtue in another who survives him, then there will always be some bit of virtue in the world of which I am the cause, and this is a state of affairs similar to the state of my being virtuous eternally’ (op. cit. 340).

21 P. 156, ‘All the Blood Within Me’, My Enemy's Enemy, by Kingsley Amis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980) (italics in original).Google Scholar

22 Eudemian Ethics, 1240b5–6.

23 Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a19–22.

24 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Ch. XLI.